BBC Official Admits Network 'Got it Wrong' on Fogel Murders

The BBC “got it wrong” in its reporting of the massacre of the Fogel family, the network admitted.

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Rachel Hirshfeld , 24/06/12 20:45

Mourning at funerals for Fogel family terror

Israel news photo: Flash 90

The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) “got it wrong” in its reporting of the massacre of the Fogel family by Arab terrorists in the Jewish community of Itamar, the broadcaster's outgoing director-general admitted at a parliamentary committee hearing.

The BBC’s Mark Thompson acquiesced on June 19 while being questioned by Conservative member of parliament Louise Mensch, the London Jewish Chronicle reported.

In complaining about the insufficient coverage of the event on BBC radio and television programs, the newspaper reported that Mensch said, “I only found out, after the event, from an American blog, called ‘Dead Jews is no news,’ and the more I went into it, the more shocked I was.”

“There was a feeling that the BBC just didn’t care and that if a settler had opened the home of a Palestinian family, slit the throat of their children, that the BBC would have covered that,” Mensch asserted.

Thompson responded by claiming that the story occurred during a “very busy news period,” including the fighting in Libya and the tsunami in Japan and that “news editors were under a lot of pressure.”

“Having said that, it was certainly an atrocity which should have been covered across our news bulletins that day,” he added.

Mensch said that she was pleased with Thompsons’s response. “I was very satisfied with his frank admission,” she said. “He understood how this had affected the Jewish community.